With Stacy Szymaszek's 11-year tenure as Director of the Poetry Project coming to an end and the search for a new Director well underway, I recently returned to the listings of the St. Mark's Poetry Project Collection in the Rare Book & Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress. Former Director Anselm Berrigan oversaw the acquisition of the Project's Archives by the Library of Congress in 2007 and the over 1,000-item collection--including decades of recordings, flyers, newsletters, and ephemera--is described as "probably the most significant [archive of] post-war poetry readings in existence." Because the collection is still unprocessed, I started corresponding with librarians at the LOC a few years ago about particular materials, lists of recordings of specific poets, and other information. The last I heard, batches of digitized recordings of poetry readings were beginning to be processed, though I haven't been able to access them yet. When this collection becomes available it will be a windfall for scholars of the New York School and the history of poetry in New York City.

But for whatever reason there is one item, and one item only, from the sprawling Poetry Project Collection that is currently available online--an item described as "Notebook of Bernadette Mayer, Project Director of St. Mark's Poetry Project, 1980." Mayer was the Director of the Project from 1980-84, preceded by Ron Padgett from 1978-80 and followed by Eileen Myles from 1984-86, and this notebook, available as a full-color 182-page PDF is a fascinating, vibrant document of Mayer's work as an arts administrator. It is, essentially, a record of Bernadette at work, a swarm of notes and reminders and information that keep one's daily responsibilities manageable, or at least traceable. In What's Your Idea of a Good Time?: Letters & Interviews 1977-1985, Mayer's letters to Bill Berkson, contemporaneous to this notebook, often mention her work at the Project. "Meanwhile," she writes in January 1981, "I've become (as I think anyone would) obsessed with Poetry Project. But I don't like other people's attitudes to my so-called authority--if only it were sexier--the directrix!" Full of love and gossip about the Project, her friends, and their thinking, the correspondence in What's Your Idea of a Good Time? also tracks the development of Mayer's book Utopia. It probably doesn't come as a surprise that working at an independent arts institution with the history and personalities of the Poetry Project would make one wish for a genuine utopia, whatever that might be. (Mayer imagines it as a lot of things, including a jail for landlords and utopia chairs). Being able to read this notebook, created amid the social and political ruckus of the Project, adds another layer to how deeply and naturally interrelated Mayer's work as Director was with her poems in the early 80s.

Filled with scribbled notes, poets' phone numbers, lists of names for possible readings, reminders, budget concerns, doodles by her then-young children, sketches of correspondence, questions, ideas for events and poems, and even a colored map of the Church describing volunteers' responsibilities for the 1980 New Year's Eve Benefit Reading, the notebook acts as an animated snapshot of the planning and record keeping that went into the events and readings that facilitate and support a community of major artists. It's an incredible visual document. From day-to-day Mayer is checking in with Alice Notley about a poster, calling John Wieners, writing to Cecil Taylor, or checking to see if a grant application for the Project Project Newsletter is due yet. A few of my favorite entires are a page that just says "Dennis Cooper" written vertically, doodles by Mayer's children Max and Marie Warsh, Bernadette's own doodles (clearly made during meetings), and the cover itself, with its loose arrangement of notes, quotes, and annotations, like altering "College Ruling" to "College Reagan Ruling" and the sketchily-housed "LOVE."

More than anything else, the notebook is a document of labor, evidence of the difficult and overwhelming work that it requires to manage an institution like the Poetry Project, including managing the personalities, egos, and arguments amongst artists and other Project employees. Perhaps the most significant document in the notebook is a three-page letter from Mayer to Bob Holman, then Coordinator, host, and workshop leader at the Project, which seems to have stemmed from Holman objecting to Mayer allowing people to smoke and drink during readings in the Church:

Dear Bob,

I'm your friend. I was your friend before I was "director" of the Poetry Project, before I knew anything about it except to teach my workshop. We work at the Poetry Project, not personally ambitiously (I hope) to further this nearly political cause, we believe in poetry. I didn't take this job for the money (the way Ron presented it to me). I took it because it's more important to me to help run the Poetry Project than to teach, etc. Also it was a chance for me + Lewis [Warsh] to live on the Lower East Side among all our friends.

Mayer continues, echoing a feeling she described to Berkson in a July 1981 letter--"I'm appalled by habits and having to be only one person":

I don't like to ever be treated like a person in a state or position of authority.... I guess maybe that is an exacerbating request--to ask to be treated as a friend, but I don't think the formality of our administrative tasks should so overwhelm us that the pleasure's not in it.... I don't like rules--in my life + in my writing I have always tried to at least see what it was like to flout them, thus perhaps my leniency at the smoking + drinking that takes place, willy-nilly in Parish Hall....I would guess I am not suited to my job because, within it, as you can see, I still want people to love me, as if it were the same as writing poetry. Maybe Ted is right + I shouldn't be the person doing this. It's true I'm not lacking for things to do. + if it begins to seem inappropriate + impossible, it won't be hard for me to cede to another.

But as it stands, I feel devoted to my task, if I can do it. Which means if we all can do it, obviously, since it's no longer autocracy.

I'm sensitive too, silly to say, + as a friend I'm begging you to know that, thus this silly letter, with all its pleading to you to be a friend + sillily help me.

It all settles, but squabbles and frustrations are ongoing. Not long after, Mayer and Holman are composing a dialogue by handing the notebook back-and-forth during a Gerard Malanga performance that both of them are particularly upset about. "This is a huge mistake," writes Holman. "I can barely stand to stay in the room," Mayer responds. The tension was interpersonal, as well. In her notes on an early Advisory Board meeting that included replacing current staff Mayer writes, "Ron doesn't want to comment on Eileen Myles." (In their novel Inferno, Myles responds in kind: "[Ron] was an American kind of phony. There are many kinds of fakery, and some are successful. I think I have Ron's figured out.") Next to the bitter, inevitable clashes and falling-outs--an ongoing narrative of all aesthetic and social communities--Mayer's own frustrations surface in other ways: "Oh poem I am so sorry / [...} / What time is it? / What was poem? / I want to weep when the men outside / Accost me + say, 'five dollars for the two of us?' / Perhaps I'm weak, we are in our 'work clothes' / [...] / All of me is forthcoming." Her authority, whether she relishes it or not, her title (Director or Directrix), and her accomplishments are nullified and tinged with self-doubt after being verbally assaulted. The invisible labor, stress, and abuse of running the Project as a woman, a mother, a poet, a friend are embedded in these lines, and evident throughout the notebook, and Mayer uses that pain to exceed the boundaries between her roles and positions: "All of me is forthcoming." Being forced to be objectified and forced to deal with some male poet's bullshit were daily practices. Mayer is there, and refuses. "I'm not you," she writes on the cover.

Read Szymascek's essay "A Good Job for a Poet" about her work and approach to directing the Project that went up yesterday at the Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog:

I like being a minor public figure. It suits me. I like showing up in magazines, going to parties, being interviewed on the radio, and doing all the figurehead stuff. I also like paperwork and pencils, efficient online grant application systems, making budgets when other people set up the Excel sheet, and attending to the details that go into making poetry readings and writing workshops happen. I wonder what I would have made of the words “infrastructure poet” when I was a teen, if Anne Waldman had been my career counselor? Through our informal mentorship, I’ve come to understand this title as a call to strengthen the sites and discourse and etiquettes that are important for poets to thrive. Anne and I had a conversation about our work in the Brooklyn Rail in 2016. Like her, I have been inspired to make sure the Project represented a larger voice than my own so that its usefulness to the community would outlive my tenure. Sometime people have rightfully said that I have been selfless, the job thankless, that I have been a caretaker; however, it is also important to note that the Project has given me a surplus of self (future?), and I can now envision anything—even writing books that have nothing to do with my life as a nonprofit arts administrator. In June, I will leave the Poetry Project, and I will feel the best kind of lost.

Ceremony Latin (1964) by Bernadette Mayer (Angel Hair, 1975). The book is 23 pages with no front or back matter and the Angel Hair address stamped on the inside of the back cover. The year 1964 is in the title because that’s when the book was written, so it is Bernadette’s “first” book, though it was her fourth published book following Story (1968), Moving (1971) and Memory (1975). In a July 17, 1989 lecture at Naropa, Bernadette describes Ceremony Latin (1964):

The structure of this book is simply the duplication of a journal that I kept when I was about 17, and it includes translation from Ovid, “The Golden Age,” and sort of funny journalistic notes and poems and things about how much I hated my grandfather. So all I did was print the journal itself and the reason I wanted to do it was because the keeping of this journal was what had inspired me to really want to become a poet, so I thought it might be beautiful and useful to other people.

Here’s a link to the full lecture: https://archive.org/details/Bernadette_Mayer_Lecture_July_1989_89P076.Bernadette would have been 18/19 in 1964, but 17 is a fair stretch. Ceremony Latin was reissued in 2006 by Shark Books, which is only $6 at SPD and worth buying. They also did a reissue of The Baskbetball Article. I ILLed an original copy from Ball State that’s been maimed by being unbound and restapled into unmarked hardcover vomit brown flaps, though the cover and interior pages are in pretty good condition.

The book begins with a translation of Ovid, followed by pages of what look like poems but could be lists of notes and imagistic jottings, some “formed” poems, quotes from Psalms and Genesis, and transcriptions of dreams. For as disjointed as the materials in the book might appear, and for as casual as Bernadette makes the book’s preparation seem (“simply the duplication of a journal”), Ceremony Latin has a deliberate structure and accumulative movement that show the early formation of her poetics. The integration and appropriation of multiple voices using quotes and quotation marks, rich syntactical juxtapositions (“smells / lemon satchet”) that led to Bernadette’s importance for Language poetics, the mixture of the contemporary and antiquity (“the western party, Vestal Virgins”), and a vernacular prosody that integrates dream into the consequences and crises of the everyday – all formal choices that would become important to works such as Midwinter Day – are at work throughout Ceremony Latin. At one point “Christ” and “Billy Budd” parallel one another. At one another point she writes “A couch is but an imprimatur / for farts.” I cried, on the beach, when I read that.

Her poems’ interest in desire, sexuality, and gender are also present here, most obviously in lines like “I masturbate with you I hope and my love is greater / than yours,” but in more subtle ways as well, like when she dreams of two women, “One is 189, the other 144 years old. Their breasts are / large and firm. They do not know how they can be so old. / Their conversation is trivial,” which echoes her earlier quote from Genesis, “And Lamech lived a hundred & 82 yrs and begot a son. / And Lamech lived after he begot Noe, five hundred & 95 yrs / & begot sons & daughters.” The tension here is between how men control the privilege of time, of being named, of being progenitors, and how women, despite their bodies, or perhaps because of how their bodies are compartmentalized based on male desire, remain anonymous, confused, trapped in “trivial” speech. Bernadette’s poems have never stopped insisting on the unacceptability of this paradigm, of confronting its violence, and forming movements through its difficulties. Later in the book she writes, “A nun helps me climb back up. I cling to her wondering / how my body feels to her. It is natural for me to be / clinging to her and not a man.” Her Catholic upbringing, and her struggle with its orthodoxy, is apparent throughout the book. The title Ceremony Latin, implying both the monolithic power-language of Catholic mass and the potential liberatory gesture of the poet-translator’s ritualistic attention to a “dead” language’s constructedness, foregrounds this question of language’s role in restricting/allowing certain ways of being in the world.

Overall, the book is funny, painful, and audacious, especially in its interest in the abject. How it is a book is also amazing to me, that it begins with a translation and moves through these various forms beyond a simple conception of “poem” and really kind of all collapses and rises together. It reminds me of the contemporary books I’ve been most obsessed by, how they break our idea of “poetry book” and “poem.” There’s also just no anxiety at all about this 23 page text being a book and not a chapbook, which is maybe a distinction we put too much weight on because of institutions. I don’t know, but I like how this book works as a book, and how it insists on being a book despite even how Bernadette tells us it is straight from a journal.

This is totally subjective, but the part of Ceremony Latin that most reminds me of “later” Bernadette poems is this page about halfway through the book, so I wanted to quote it in full. There’s no title. She mentions her sister, Rosemary Mayer, who became a visual artist, and Vito Acconci, who Bernadette edited the magazine 0 to 9 with in the late ‘60s.

Dream more real than life. Every old woman

is a fetus at a phony saints feet. There are no works

of art without sentiment. I doubt Rosemary’s interest

in art. I never dream about Vito. My conscious feeling

about him must be more real than dream. Jealousy is

worse than morality. Instead of a harmless father image

he has turned into a lover image and I was too slow in

realizing it I have committed my self to a whole set

of institutions superstitions prejudices projections and

customs which I denied & deny in my mind. Marriage

like this is half old and half new. I love queers.

The last page of the book has this one line on it: “Scorpions when threatened by fire commit suicide.”

The Basketball Article by Anne Waldman and Bernadette Mayer (Angel Hair Books, 1975). I think Cassandra sent me a pdf of The Basketball Article. I printed it out and stapled it together. It sat on a shelf for a while, then I read it, re-read it, saw there was an essay about it in The Color of Vowels that I didn’t read, saw it mentioned in an essay by Daniel Kane about Angel Hair, read it again. This is Bernadette’s note at the beginning, dated July 15, 1975:

THE BASKETBALL ARTICLE was conceived in November 1974 & written in April 1975 as an assignment for OUI magazine. We got to go to all the Nets games we wanted through Barney Kremenko, Publicity, but Jim Wergeles of the Knicks balked, “What do you girls really do?” We heard he was a jock. We went to the first women’s basketball game held in Madison Square Garden. We wrote a review that was rejected for being too technical. We tried not to make THE BASKETBALL ARTICLE too technical so it was rejected by a group of editors a few of whom thought it “was a minor masterpiece,” the others “couldn’t tell what the hell was going on” in it. We were rejected by the Village Voice for whom the work was not technical enough. An agent told us THE BASKETBALL ARTICLE was fragmented and could not be handled. We never got into the locker room. A purely prophetic work in the tradition of social realism, THE BASKETBALL ARTICLE is duplicated here in an edition of 100 copies, by a Gestetner 420 mimeograph machine using green film stencils no. 62. We express our thanks to Mr. DeBusschere, Mr. Kremenko, Mr. Padgett, Mr. Rezek, Mr. Robertson, & Mr. Warsh.

Is there a school for sports announcers? They should all have to read this. The note is such an amazing performance of the intricacies and tensions of how the female poets of the “second generation” New York school fucked with and played against the warp and mess of gender expectations in the 70s. The whole book takes those issues of male dominance and exposes them in the scene and celebrity of basketball. Two women conceiving together in spite of the jocks, how technical mastery or a failure to master (mister) is noticed/received/reviled, what it means to be seen and given access (publicity/privaticity), to have or not have titles, to be whole or in pieces, what it means to (mis)represent an ideology, to be rejected/accepted/handled/owned/duplicated, the clout of expertise and the disregard of being inept, the prophetic in the easily reproduced and popularly reported. “We never got into the locker room.” To be a charlatan, to be marginal, and to write out of and through the thrill and profanity of those deficiencies not as deficiencies but as channels of renewal. Joyful, flamboyant little aporias as the clock ticks down.

The Basketball Article predates the funny ESPN office commercials by 30 years, and undoes all of them. It’s only 13 pages long, but the prose has this irreducible audacity that so excellently combines Anne and Bernadette’s hilarious charm with their insistence on performing the complications of consumption and desire attached to being a female body. They talk about wearing lipstick to the games and flirting with the players. “We begin to dress in red, white and blue, we do not stand up for the national anthem.” They talk about how baffling they are to players, managers, and the press. “We enter their consciousness. We carry a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets with us.” They talk about their female bodies and the male bodies of the players and the exaggerations of bodies. “It’d be interesting to put Oscar Robertson into a dream laboratory. He never crossed his legs.” They talk about how they love it and couldn’t give a shit less. “We were sitting in our hotel suite at the Plankinton House in Milwaukee drinking Tequila Sunrises.” It’s really about pleasure, the pleasures of ritual and attention, how sports direct our pleasures, how poetry directs our pleasures. It wants us to talk about that space. The fact that they called it The Basketball Article, with the emphasis on the definite article “the” and how it names the text as a singular, authoritative gesture, like saying we, Bernadette and Anne, are going to write the article about basketball, is totally indicative of their audacity on a larger scale. Also, there’s a joke at the end of the book about Full Court Press, an amazing press that put out Frank O'Hara’s Selected Plays.

The picture on the cover of The Basketball Article is of a man speaking, who looks like a basketball player at a press conference, and a woman not speaking looking at the man. The picture really foregrounds the problems of reverence that Bernadette performs in her introductory note when she thanks the basketball people along with “Mr. Padgett” and “Mr. Warsh.” Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh, who edited Angel Hair together, used to be married. Bernadette and Lewis started seeing each other in 1975 and were having children together soon after. Anne and Bernadette’s shared pleasure in making this book, and their shared pleasure in these men, and how they articulate that pleasure on their own terms, is an incredibly radical sexual-poetic statement. It’s funny that Ron Padgett is mentioned though. Ron seems to continually end up being the butt of the joke whenever Bernadette, Anne, Alice, or Eileen talk about their relationships with male poets during that time. I’m writing this in Minneapolis where today someone told me they saw Ron read at a Swedenborgian Church. I want to play basketball with all of the poets at the Swedenborgian Church.